A Book Blog for Speculative Fiction, Graphic Novels… and more!

Mogsy’s Bookshelf Roundup: Stacking the Shelves & Recent Reads

Bookshelf Roundup is a feature I do every other weekend which fills the role of several blog memes, like Stacking the Shelves where I talk about the new books I’ve added to my library or received for review, as well as It’s Monday! What Are You Reading? where I round up what I’ve read since the last update and what I’m planning to read soon. Mostly it also serves as a recap post, so sometimes I’ll throw in stuff like reading challenge progress reports, book lists, and other random bookish thoughts or announcements.

Received for Review

Happy December, everyone! It’s a relatively light week for activity due to the recent Thanksgiving holiday in the US, and I hope all those who celebrated had a wonderful time. My plans to catch up on some reading didn’t exactly pan out, but that’s okay because my brother was visiting from Canada and it was great spending that time with family! This month though, I’m making it a point to hunker down and put a dent in my TBR and I’ve been really good on reining back requests. Even so, there’s still lots of goodies to feature, and I’d like to thank all the publishers and authors for the following review copies received. For more details and full descriptions of the books, be sure to click the links to their Goodreads pages!

Dreamweaver by C.S. Friedman– Book three of Dreamwalker, C.S. Friedman’s YA/crossover series that I’ve been really enjoying so far. I think this is the final installment, so I have to know how it ends! My thanks to DAW for the finished copy.

Hungry Ghosts by Stephen Blackmoore– Thanks also to DAW for this surprise arrival from the Eric Carter series which I’ve wanted to check out for a while. Unfortunately, this is book three and I haven’t read the first two! Looks like I have some catching up to do first!

The Dispatcher by John Scalzi– Another fantastic surprise from the wonderful folks at Subterranean Press. I was pretty excited to learn they’ll be publishing the print edition of this novella, which thus far has only been available in audio.

Charlie the Choo-Choo by Beryl Evans– My initial response was confusion when an unsolicited package from Simon & Schuster arrived last week and this came out. As far as I knew, I was not on any of their children’s reviewers lists so it was pretty bizarre to receive a picture book. But then I noticed the blurb from Stephen King. And then I laughed when I looked it up and realized that Beryl Evans IS Stephen King. Fans of The Dark Towerare probably reading this now and going, “durr, Mogsy” but hey, I never made it past The Gunslinger! I never knew about some book about some creepy sentient train. Anyway, I’ll probably end up giving this to my kids one day, but even my oldest will need to wait a few more years. She took one look at that cover and said, “Mommy, his eyes are scary.”

Won and Purchased

It’s been a while since I won anything from giveaways, probably because I haven’t been entering any. The Fall of Fair Isle by Rowena Cory Daniells was actually a book I won back in a Goodreads giveaway in April 2015! When it never arrived, I just let it go. Earlier this fall though, I came across a great review of this book on a blog and I commented, along with a brief lament about how it’s a shame I lost my chance to check it out. To my shock, a couple weeks later I received an email from the author to let me know about the publisher problems with that particular giveaway, and offered to send me the book! It was such an amazing and sweet thing to do, that I was completely floored. When the package came, I saw that the author also included another one of her books, Besieged. So thank you so much, Rowena, I can’t wait to read the books and I will never forget your generosity.

What I’ve Read Since the Last Update

Between making Thanksgiving preparations and caving in to my friends’ insistence on joining their Overwatch team, my reading time has taken a severe hit these past two weeks! I still managed to knock a few books off Mount TBR though (and there’s actually one more book I read that I couldn’t include here because I can’t talk about it yet) so I probably ended up doing more reading than I expected. Stay tuned for reviews.

Have you heard of or read any of the books featured this week? What caught your eye? Any new discoveries? I hope you found something interesting for a future read! Let me know what you plan on checking out. Until next time, see you next Roundup!

It is a children’s book – I gave it a read and it’s pretty tame stuff, but I definitely would recommend it for the older spectrum (i.e. not for my own kids yet, since my oldest is only 4, almost 5). Then again, I have seen even from parents of 10-12-year-olds saying that the images creeped out their kids a little, so I guess it all depends!

How long does it take you to put a post like this together? Besides the actual typing, you’ve got a lot of links to deal with and the pictures. I like roundup type posts as it helps me to remember what other people have reviewed, since I tend to “read and forget” the majority of what is in my feed.

Roundup posts don’t take me long at all (much faster than actually typing up a review, that’s for sure!) because I have the template all prepared and ready to go. It’s just a matter of plugging in comments, copy/pasting links, and inserting images. I make my life easier too by taking one photo of my physical books rather than uploading 6-12 new covers every week because prepping the pics is a big part of what makes formatting a PITA.

And I like roundup posts on other sites for that reason too, it’s a good reminder of what the blogger enjoyed and what they are reading soon, and I always find new reads. That’s why I adopted the feature for myself too 🙂

Babylon’s Ashes is one of the books I’m most excited about – and it comes out on Monday!!!!!! (I even placed myself an alert on the computer, not that I was likely to forget it…). And I enjoyed The Dispatcher very much, despite the audio format: for once, I was able to keep my attention focused, so I count it as a double victory 🙂

Holy crap yes, I’m soooo excited to dive into Babylon’s Ashes! I’m currently reading a huge anthology by Le Guin though, which is also amazing, and gah too many good books to be reading how can I choose?! I am also excited that The Expanse series is coming to Amazon Prime later this month, I need to catch up with the episodes 🙂

I love the look of all three of the Tor books. I will definitely read the Cherie Priest – really looking forward to that one.
I see you read Certain Dark things. I look forward to your review of that one.
Lynn 😀

I’m needing a copy of that Stephen King book and how funny is it that he blurbed his own book! I hope to get to Certain Dark Things in a week or so. I’m so excited for it. I also can’t wait to read Down Among the Sticks and Bones because I loved the first one so much. Great haul!

Seeing that you’ve read and are ready to review Fireborn reminds me that I still need to read Skyborn. It’s sitting on my shelf, waiting for me to pick it up…

No new books for me. I go on an annual book-buying ban around the holidays, but I put several books on my Christmas list this year. But I also decided recently to rent books from the library once a month. So I might start doing that during my end “stay-cation” from my day job.

Your newest book acquisitions are all new-to-me titles :O I need to catch up on some new releases, it’s shameful! Anyway, I love the covers for Charlie the Choo-Choo (how COOL is that?!) and Brother’s Ruin! I hope you enjoy all of these Mogsy!!

I never got past Gunslinger, either, so your comments about Charlie the Choo-Choo made me laugh! What a bizarre picture book XD Everything on your list sounds exciting, although I’m REALLY excited to hear what you think about Emma Newman’s steampunk.

About Us

Welcome to The BiblioSanctum! A Book Blog for Speculative Fiction, Graphic Novels... and more! Steff (Mogsy), Tiara and Wendy are proud moms, geeks, gamers and bibliophiles. We're always reading and yet, there never seem to be enough books! Our Goodreads lists are an eclectic assortment of genres -- and we love to share our thoughts. The BiblioSanctum is a home for our absolute love of reading.